Pixar produced a short film titled Red's Dream.Lucasfilm produced a feature film titled Star Wars.Nintendo produced a video game titled Uniracers to prove the Super NES wasn't slow.Pixar successfully sued Nintendo on grounds that Uniracers was too similar to Red's Dream.Disney owns Pixar.Disney owns Lucasfilm.

As explained on Nintendo Life, in an interview with Unirally developer Mike Dailly: "We modelled the unicycle exactly, based on a real life unicycle. The problem with Pixar was that they seemed to think that any computer generated unicycle was owned by them. They took footage from Red's Dream and compared it to Unirally and the unicycles were virtually the same; this isn't a big surprise as there's not a lot of ways you can bring life to a unicycle without looking like the one Pixar did. The judge - being the moron that he was - agreed. While it was a unicycle, and did look similar, I think he should have looked at the game as a whole. If he had, then he would have noticed that the game was a completely different environment, and the â€˜character' of the unicycle just wasn't the same."

Was this Mike Dailly person even aware of Red's Dream's existence? I've never even heard of it until now...

Something that never made sense to me is how much developers (such as Treasure) talked about how much they had to rely on optimizations to make use of the Sega Genesis's "blastprocessing" CPU. If it's so powerful, why do you need so many tricks in order to get it to run fast, and why didn't you use any of those tricks on the SNES?

developers (such as Treasure) talked about how much they had to rely on optimizations to make use of the Sega Genesis's "blastprocessing" CPU.

I was never aware of them doing this. All I heard was them saying that there games (how they are) wouldn't be possible on the SNES. Developers working on a particular system are known to talk about it favorably compared to others, justified or not. Konami wasn't exactly known for being good at programing for the SNES, and I think I heard most of their arcade machines from the time used the Motorola 68000, so it would make sense that they'd have an easier time there, as people from Treasure came from Konami. I always found it funny how they sort of trashed talked the SNES but then went to make games for the N64 (and the Saturn). Did they just not like working on more popular systems (like the PlayStation)?

I'm sure there were programmers that preferred the 68000 and others that didn't like it.

Honestly i think that a very few percent of programmer which know the 68000 don't like it...I started on 6502 assembly (only the basics, i was just getting the power of assembly compared to basic language then :p). Later i developed for the Saturn cpu (which is quite exotic), then x86 for many years, then ARM and SHx cpu... I discovered 68000 quite late (i did know it but wasn't programming for it) and honestly even on the late i think it's still one of the best designed CPU with a very efficient and straightforward instruction set, it's my favorite when it comes to do assembly programming, definitely... The Z80 for instance is a CPU which i don't like, many registers (for a 8 bits CPU) but the instruction set do no take full benefit of it, i far prefer the customized / economic GB version which remove useless parts and add very useful instructions to it

To make a simple reply to the subject, i think the architecture of the SNES is the main reason why we don't see much homebrew for it... The SNES is probably one of the most popular retro gaming system, i'm certain a lot of people tried "to play" with (as i did actually) but got quickly discouraged or frustrated by the complex / convoluted architecture of the system. And by complex i don't mean it in the good way, here the complexity is only a pain and affect what we can do with the system, definitely.We often read the CPU is slow but indeed the CPU is not *that slow*, even working at ~3 Mhz (mixed fast rom / ram speed) the synchronous RAM access (compared to 1/4 68000 access) make it definitely not that slow in term of "instruction" rate (probably higher then what we have with the 7.7Mhz 68000) BUT what hurt a lot if the CPU technology itself... Based on 6502 (which is already very basic as a 8 bit CPU), the 65816 is too archaic and definitely more in the range of the 8 bits CPU generation than 16 bits (even with the 16 bits internal ALU), aside the PPU weirdness i was so disappointed when i started programming the 65816, almost each new discovery about this CPU was a disappointment for me... I quickly dropped the idea to develop on SNES just because of that, the CPU would definitely limit me in what i could do on this system (at this time i was interested in doing basic 3D rendering) and i would never use extra hardware as Super-FX which denature entirely the system for me.

To make a simple reply to the subject, i think the architecture of the SNES is the main reason why we don't see much homebrew for it[...]BUT what hurt a lot if the CPU technology itself... Based on 6502 (which is already very basic as a 8 bit CPU), the 65816 is too archaic and definitely more in the range of the 8 bits CPU generation than 16 bits (even with the 16 bits internal ALU), aside the PPU weirdness i was so disappointed when i started programming the 65816, almost each new discovery about this CPU was a disappointment for me

Yet the 6502 itself draws plenty of Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and NES homebrew development, even with all the weirdness of the TIA, VIC-II, and PPU.

I did a bit of SH-X coding but that is definitely very different from the Saturn CPU itself (hopefully :-p)

The 6502 systems you are talking about all come from the 80 years era so the 6502 is not that hurting for these architectures (by miles simpler than the snes) and somehow expected from olds systems like these. But a 65816 cpu in a 90's year system, really *that hurts*...

Something to take into account is that there isn't anything like SGDK but for the SNES. I think nearly all the Genesis homebrewers are just using SGDK (I prefer programming to the bare metal instead). So consider looking into that first.

As for Treasure: something to take into account is that they were making commercial games and that meant tight deadlines. The 68000 instruction set makes it much easier to get things done (both make the code and debug it) and this means they had more room to do crazy things and still manage to stay within the deadlines. The SNES has fast multiplication hardware which should help for stuff like what they did, but the problem is everything else in that sense.

His next big game, Enemy Zero, was meant to be for the PlayStation. His team had already started developing for Sony's platform, but he was upset with how Sony had short-changed his shipment of D, shipping less than a third of what they said they would. So he took his revenge at a Sony press conference. As he walked out on stage to announce his new title, the screen behind him showed a PlayStation logo... that quietly warped into a Sega Saturn logo, and he went on to announce his game for Sony's rival platform, at their own event, simply because they'd backed out of a promise.

I did a bit of SH-X coding but that is definitely very different from the Saturn CPU itself (hopefully :-p)

And the "Tom" RISC CPU in the Atari Jaguar is very different from the AMD Jaguar APU in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But I just see "SH" and think "32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast".

Another problem, as I realized when my (now former*) artist visited yesterday, is that there's a set of game designs that cannot be trimmed down to work on the NES but don't quite need a 3D GPU. The Super NES fills that gap, but it turns out not to be very wide, as 93143 mentioned in this post. This is demonstrated by graphically competent Chinese Famicom demakes of Super NES games such as Aladdin.

* The reason I say "former" is that my sister told me she's done with 2D games. She wants to work on at least N64, after which point I told her there's not really that much qualitative difference between that and a low-poly PC game.

The SNES has fast multiplication hardware which should help for stuff like what they did, but the problem is everything else in that sense.

But it takes a good amount of time to set up the multiplication and division because it's not internal to the 65816. I actually thought that that's where the 65816 was mostly beaten at compared to the 68000, and the lack of any 32 bit instructions doesn't help. In a 2D console though, it isn't as important as it would be otherwise, but still.

Sik wrote:

And I wouldn't be surprised if Treasure didn't work with Sony due to how they treated developers (at least small ones).

I actually just noticed that I've never owned a Sony console, and I own every Nintendo console, (and handheld), a Genesis, and an Xbox 360, and my sister owns an Xbox One but never plays it so it might as well be mine (but I never play it, so...). I like the original PlayStation, but I've never seen the draw to the other ones. The PlayStation 2 doesn't have Super Smash Bros Melee, Super Monkey Ball, or Halo 2, the PS3 doesn't have Halo 3, and the PS4 might as well be the exact same thing as the Xbone. I think a large draw to the PlayStation 2 came from RPGs, and everyone already knows my opinion on them. It's not that it's bad, but I'll just see the PS2 near the top on an "all time" video game console list, while the GameCube and the Xbox are resting at about 10th place. I don't get it. (I have a GameCube and my cousin had an Xbox, so I never had the PlayStation 2 experience or whatever.) I don't know why I felt like sharing that.

tepples wrote:

She wants to work on at least N64, after which point I told her there's not really that much qualitative difference between that and a low-poly PC game.

Hopefully she's not coding in assembly, unless she likes MIPS. I wish her good luck though, as I don't think I've ever really seen any N64 homebrew. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen any GameCube homebrew either, although I've seen a good bit of Wii homebrew like "Ironing Maiden".

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